A short introduction to #Additivism

01-03-2016 10:42

Morehshin Allahyari & Daniel Rourke - #Additivism talk at Sonic Acts Academy, photo by Pieter Kers
By Tina Amirtha Some social movements employ a hashtag to gain extra momentum. #ILookLikeAnEngineer and #BlackLivesMatter, a couple of the biggest ones from the past year, were pretty self-explanatory. Other movements, however, might require a person to study a miniature library of books before they seem promising. #Additivism could be one of these more complex movements of the last years. #Additivism is shorthand for a larger research project that the artists Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke have been working on for almost two years. Working off of the popularity of 3D printing in the maker world, Allahyari and Rourke started to ask themselves how 3D printing could become a tool for social change. The answer they arrived at: "#Additivism is a vision of horror – a future in which we fill our lives with ever more useless trinkets of 3D printed plastic." Last year, Allahyari and Rourke created a 10-minute movie/manifesto, called the “#Additivist Manifesto.

The 3D Additivist Manifesto from Morehshin Allahyari on Vimeo.

Of course, not all 3D printed objects are junk. Ironically, 3D printing’s additive construction technique is generally regarded as un-wasteful. Whereas most of the objects that we use today are mass-manufactured with tools that cut away and then dispose of extra material, additive manufacturing only uses the exact amount of material – plastic, metal, protein– that is needed to realise a design. Paradoxes seem to be a vital part of Allahyari’s and Rourke’s movement. Towards the end of the movie/manifesto, there is a tangible message: Allahyari and Rourke want interested parties to contribute 3D printable project ideas to their movement. A selection of these crowd-sourced projects will be released later this year as a book, to be titled The 3D Additivist Cookbook. Allahyari and Rourke borrowed the title’s style from the William Powell’s 1971 book The Anarchist Cookbook. Below is an #Additivism reading list of other books that inspired the manifesto: · William Powell, The Anarchist Cookbook · Philip K. Dick, Pay for the Printer / Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? · F.T. Marinetti, The Manifesto of Futurism · Samuel Butler, Darwin Among the Machines · Evelyn Fox-Keller, Refiguring Life · John Gray, Straw Dogs · Stanislaw Lem, Solaris · Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming · Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials · Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto · Stephen Jay Gould & Elisabeth S. Vrba, Exaptation: A Missing Term in the Science of Form · Susan Sontag, The Imagination of Disaster · Benjamin Bratton, Some Trace Effects of the Post- Anthropocene: On Accelerationist Geopolitical Aesthetics · Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution · Anna Greenspan & Suzanne Livingston, Future Mutation: Technology, Shanzai and the Evolution of Species · Donna Haraway, Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene: Staying with the Trouble · Christina Reed, Dawn of the Plasticene Age · Svetlana Boym, The Off-Modern Mirror · Jorge Luis Borges, The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge · Michel Foucault, The Order of Things · Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share

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